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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26411932">Theodicy and the Book of Nicolò</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim'>Margo_Kim</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Old Guard (Movie 2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>'the question of why we suffer' is weirdly not a tag but that's the gist of this, Christian Character, Depression, Gen, Immortality, M/M, POV Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Pre-Canon, Pre-Relationship, Religious Guilt, Religious Imagery &amp; Symbolism, Self-Harm, Suicide Attempt</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 07:15:24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,955</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26411932</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>That Jesus Christ returned to His body no longer seemed, to Nicolò, miraculous. It seemed to Nicolò, who despised himself for the blasphemy and yet blasphemed regardless, intolerable cruelty torture a man to death and then refuse to let him die.</p><p>What would you call such a thing? Nicolò called it Hell.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>81</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Theodicy and the Book of Nicolò</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>theodicy: n. the vindication of divine goodness and providence in view of the existence of evil. basically arguments about how God can be omnipotent, omniscient, and loving yet still allow suffering.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The promise of heaven is life unending after death. What then is life unending without dying? It is suffering eternal. To be a body in this imperfect world is to be ground by the millstone. Death is the temporary liberation from the frail and tortuous flesh. Even the bodily resurrection of the end of days promised the spirits of heaven to return to the earth only when the earth was made at last perfect again. Jesus Christ, both God and Man, was His body and inhabited His body, offered His body, endured His body, and eventually vacated His body. </p><p>That Jesus Christ returned to His body no longer seemed, to Nicolò, miraculous. It seemed to Nicolò, who despised himself for the blasphemy and yet blasphemed regardless, intolerable cruelty torture a man to death and then refuse to let him die.</p><p>What would you call such a thing? Nicolò called it Hell. </p><p>In his agony, he found relief by listing his sins. They slid like beads in place, the endless flaws and crimes of his mortal life; they explained his suffering. Here he acted in anger, here pride, here disobedience against his betters. He counted up lusts and vices, finding new perversions and indecencies in each memory he revisited. He flagellated, paid penance out of his accursed flesh, and watched those wounds, his offerings to God, seal up without an answer. Determining that he must not have atoned in full, he searched his life and repented new crimes. He wept for the times he lowered his eyes from God to the jawline of a handsome man. He whipped himself for the mornings of prayer when he resented leaving the warmth of his bed. The tears dried. The wounds healed. Nicolò remained. </p><p>Even now in Hell and burning, he still could not cease his sinning, his blasphemy. He would think, <em> God has placed me where even He cannot reach, </em>and sink further into his heretical misery. </p><p>It is worth auditing his accounting. Nicolò was not an impartial observer of his own life. Who is? We none of us stand outside ourselves looking in until our bodies have given up the ghost. And Nicolò’s body gave up nothing. What crimes then did Nicolò neglect? </p><p>Do you think the crusader thought, <em> My sins include the butchered Turks, my sword buried in corpses of its own creation </em>? We know the disappointing answer. Nicolò was not yet what he would someday be. </p><p>He did not yet think, <em> My sin is this burning land, the torch set to the raided field that our enemies will know no succour. Here is a body, there and there and there as well, killed if not by my hand then by my cause, the liberation of a holy dream that I found was inhabited by men of matter. I killed a Turk as one would a rabid dog incapable of reason or love. He was a man as I am a man, and therefore surely if I am beloved by God (although I cannot, as I once did, believe that), then he must be as well. God made man in His image and then made Himself in the image of man. God is in any man and every man. I have killed this man in hate. I have killed God.  </em></p><p>He did not, he could not, or rather could not allow himself to think such a thing. It is no simple thing to look upon the suffering Christ and understand yourself to be the Roman soldier. And when he did, when he could, despite the impossibility of such fancies, he cursed the treachery of his weak heart. Those thoughts were not his own. They were the whispers of the demon. </p><p>Oh yes. We come now to sleep, as Nicolò came to sleep: haltingly, reluctantly, with terror in our hearts. How cruel of his body to refuse death but to demand this nightly dying. </p><p>The demon visited Nicolò nightly. After too many failed killings at each other’s hands, they had fled each other in waking hours only to find themselves shackled together in dreams. He was, as all temptations are, too sweet and too rich and too fine. He was a Turk with a handsome face and cold eyes and cold steel. In dreams, sometimes Nicolò watched him, and sometimes Nicolò was him, and sometimes the demon was Nicolò, and sometimes they were two women in a distant land, two women who were walking closer and closer and closer. </p><p>“I think sometimes,” the demon said to Nicolò one night in dreams, “that those two women are the only people who can kill us. And that is why they come.” </p><p>“You’ll die at no one’s hand but my own,” Nicolò replied. </p><p>He flayed his back with self-flagellation and when that gained him no results, he found other ways of punishing the flesh. But these methods proved imperfect in their efficacy. How to torture without executing? One day in his zealous repentance, he sliced too deep. He knew he was dying when he suddenly felt cold underneath the noon day sun. A sin, a sin, an unforgivable sin, he thought, cut again, and let death happen. The blood left him, running out of his arm like the plagued river of Egypt, and on the other side of this horror, this punishment, Nicolò knew, there would be the long desert, yes, but there would be freedom, there would be peace. His numbed fingers dropped the knife, that key of liberation, and embraced eternity. </p><p>When he woke, he was hot again. The sun had baked him and his skin burned. But his skin would heal. It would heal that it might burn again and again and again.</p><p>“I felt you die today,” the demon said that night in dreams. </p><p>Nicolò’s laugh filled his mouth like sand. “But here I am.” </p><p>The demon touched his own neck. There was no scar there--never, Nicolò thought bitterly, any scars--but there was a line in the beard like a skilled tailor’s seam, visible only with the closest observator. As though a blade had once sliced through cloth now repaired. “You have to try. It was with this dagger.” He held up the dagger. Nicolò recognized it, had been impaled and sliced by it for all the good it did. “In the fire of Hell I will be punished with this dagger for what I have used it for. And yet I did not die.” The demon looked at Nicolò, and while his steel remained cold, his eyes were not at all. “Is that suicide, Frank? If I cannot die but hoped I would? Will I burn?” </p><p>Every man, no matter how aware of his own sins and failings and culpability for his woes, in the lowest and darkest hour of his life finds himself in Job, that blameless man tormented by God. And in Job’s misery, his friends arrive and dissect in all the ways Job deserved his agony. And Job protests, no, no, I did nothing but my children are dead, my wife is dead, my fortune is gone, my health is gone, I am defenseless before God and I do not understand <em> why </em>. </p><p>Nicolò, too aware and still unaware of his failings and faults, cast himself as Job and Job’s friends: both the blameless victim and the accuser of blame. And Nicolò lamented and hated himself for lamenting, repented and believed he had nothing left to repent. And where was the whirlwind? God sweeping down to answer questions with questions? Were you there at the foundation of the earth, God asked Job. If God asked the same of Nicolò, he could not hear. What was the story of Job? What was the point? Why did Job suffer? Why had God done this to him? Why could Nicolò not submit to the mystery? </p><p>In the face of Nicolò’s silence, the Turk turned cold again, cold as steel and more painful somehow. Perhaps Nicolò had grown too accustomed to the pain of steel. “Why do I ask you? Of course you think I will burn. You have made clear what you think I am, what you think my countrymen and my brothers in faith are. Get out of my dream, Frank. I am sorry to have felt you today in my waking hours. Give me the privacy of my sleeping ones.” </p><p>“Elihu tells Job that God speaks in two ways,” Nicolò said. He did not know why he said it. The Turk looked as if he did not know why Nicolò had said it either. “He speaks to us in dreams when our eyes are closed and in calamities when our ears are open.” </p><p>“What do you mean to tell me with this?” asked the Turk after a moment. His face was still cold, still sharp, and Nicolò could not look away from it, like running his thumb along the edge of a blade. </p><p>What was intolerable about Job’s friends? Their certainty. Their certainty that they understood God and suffering and the reasons for the universe, as if there was reason understandable to mortals, as if God need explain Himself to the world He created.  </p><p>“I don’t know,” Nicolò said. “I know nothing.” </p><p>The Turk looked at him, and Nicolò looked at the Turk, in the strange world of dreams where God talked and no one understood.  </p><p>Nicolò woke. He woke and thought about the undying Turk. He woke and thought--allowed himself at last to think--of the Turks who died. Whom he killed, and wished to kill, and believed should be killed, in the name of God and glory. Those men allowed to receive the gift that Nicolò was denied again and again, and he thought, as Job thought, as Job’s friends thought, what his crime was. <em> If I am innocent, Lord, release me. If I am guilty, tell me my crime. The men I killed died and are dead. The men I killed alongside died and are dead. I died and am living still. The Turk is living still. What crime have we both committed that our sentence is the same? </em></p><p>
  <em> What good have we both committed to have earned this boon?  </em>
</p><p>Nicolò had never before this moment thought that their undying lives might be a gift. </p><p>Two days later, the Turk found him again. This time, in the waking world. Their swords remained in their sheaths. They emptied instead their boots, and sitting in silence side by side, they sat on the bank and let the river wash their feet. </p><p>“I am tired of dreaming of you,” the Turk announced to the buzzing insects of the encroaching night. “When I followed you to slit your throat, I never dreamed of you. Nor did I dream of you when you were stalking me.” The Turk almost smiled, and Nicolò’s skin burned again, a burn that would not heal for it was no injury at all. “I knew you were near, those times. When you are near, my sleep is easy and punctuated by nothing but a blade.” </p><p>“I am tired. I am confused. I am, I think, more wretched than I ever dreamed, and I understand nothing.” Nicolò said. “I will not kill you again.”</p><p>“Our problem is that you have not killed me yet.” </p><p>They sat together, feet in the river. They said nothing and understood nothing. The sun went down and the moon arose, and too the stars. Job asked God why he suffered so, and God asked Job if he could bind the chains of the Pleiades or loosen Orion’s belt. Job could not and neither could Nicolò. Nor could the Turk, whose name was Yusuf and who smiled at last in the surprise of being asked. </p><p>
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